Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Arthur Danto Interview (Art New England)

Originally appeared
in Art New England 10/05

Arthur Danto: The Original Endowment

“Contemporary” has come to designate something more than simply
the art of the present moment. In my view, moreover, it designates less a
period than what happens after there are no more periods in some master
narrative of art, and less a style of making art than a style of using styles. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art
and the Pale of History

HB: In After the End of Art, you write, apropos
Duchamp and his followers, that “I must count myself among them.” In what way?

AD: It seems to
me that when advanced artists were trying to reopen the question of what
painting was, Duchamp realized that there was a deeper point, which was to
reopen the question of what art was. In that sense, at least, I am a
Duchampian.

HB: You make a
distinction between Duchamp and Pop, Duchamp and, say, Warhol.

AD: Warhol awakened
me to the questions about the distinction between an art work and what I call a
real object. That certainly had been raised by Duchamp but Duchamp was not
certain what he achieved. It was a kind of a joke, and he was isolated. Now,
suddenly, it was happening everywhere, all across the art world, Cage with the
question about music and sound, the Judson group with distinctions between
dance and mere bodily movement, and, radically, in the visual arts.

HB: Your writing
focuses on the Duchampian syndrome: what’s art, what isn’t? How, in this
century, do we make the distinction or accommodate to the uncertainty?

AD: It really is
one of the marks of the intellectual history of the twentieth-century that
people have been interested in the discovery of limits. It’s as though
possibilities were opening up but at the same time closing down. One of the
things closing down was the prospect of constant advance. For example, the
discoveries of Godel were deep discoveries about how far logic could go, how
far, in a certain sense, reason could go. Since Godel’s discovery, mathematics
in a funny way has been pluralized. You find the limits and there’s no choice
but to move in some lateral kind of way, to explore across a wide boundary.

That takes place in art and in the academy. Pluralization
has taken over in such a way one no longer knows what discipline something
belongs under.

HB: In your
critique of Clement Greenberg, you say art has now divested itself of
philosophical underpinnings. The effort to define art — what you call the Age
of Manifestos, coinciding with the age of political manifestos, in which you
situate Greenberg — is finished. Art can be anything.

AD: That’s right.
There’s been this tremendous birth struggle. Art is liberated to do anything,
and if philosophers want to deal with it, they can — not that many in
philosophy have been trying, I’m afraid.

HB: This
pluralization energizes you in a way that’s palpable in your writing. But it
wears out a lot of other writers, who seem exhausted by the endless mutations
of this retrovirus called “art.” From their prose, anyway, it seems they just
grow tired of tracking it.

AD: I gave a talk
at the College Art Association, and afterward, one of the questions put to me
was, what do you really like? And I said, you know, I never think about that
but if I were to just write about things I like, well, I’m a really
conservative person. I really like little paintings, luminous little paintings,
but feel that as a critic I constantly have to deal with things that I don’t
like. And that is energizing. I think to myself, do I have to take that on too?
Then I do, and I’m grateful afterward.

HB: You ask what
can guide art criticism in a pluralistic age such as ours, an age when the
traditional critic would have been blown away by “the slashed felt, the
shattered glass, the spattered lead, the splintered plywood, the crudely
twisted wire, the latex-soaked cheese cloth, the vinyl-soaked rope, the neon
signs, the video monitors, the chocolate-smeared breasts, the tethered couple,
the slashed flesh, the torn garments, or the sundered house with which artistic
statements were made in those years [the ‘60s and ‘70s] and since.”

But what are the standards for judging this new art? You
haven’t convinced me you’ve come up with them.

AD: That’s
probably right. At least, they are not just visual standards. It gets to be
like the analysis of texts. You have very complex criteria. You find out what
it’s about, how well it embodies what its about, how successful it is in
transforming perception.

HB: Recently
someone said to me, “Duchamp has a lot to answer for.” There is still plenty of
anti-Duchampianism around. Let me phrase my own worry about what Duchamp has
wrought: if art can be everything, what’s to stop it from being nothing? What
prevents it, say, from dissolving into advertising? Don’t you think there’s a
danger?

AD: I don’t. If
there’s anything to my theories at all, it’s that Duchamp doesn’t have a lot to
answer for because those changes were built into the structure, the historical
structure of things.

People are always going to be making art. To think of art
stopping is a lot like thinking language will stop, like saying, for example,
Lenny Bruce has a lot to answer for. It’s too much part of the original
endowment of human beings that they need to embody meanings. As long as they
need to embody meanings, it seems to me there’s no possibility of art
disappearing.

What disappears is the sense of narrative, progress — things
that were momentarily identified with the making of art and of beautiful
objects.

HB: You, too, are
a mixed breed, a hybrid of sorts, not unlike the sorts of installations you
describe. You call yourself an analytic philosopher — supposedly given to tight
logical analysis and to ridding the world of metaphysics — but your fundamental
influence with regard to art is Hegel. I think of you as a closet Hegelian

AD: The agenda
was so exciting when I became a philosopher. What made one feel good being an
analytical philosopher was that you were going to solve the problems of the
world. That agenda has all collapsed. What’s left is a certain style, a
commitment to logical consequence, to the idea that you can, by pressing hard
enough, get important problems to collapse, so you see their true character.

At the same time, the boundaries of what you can take on
have widened tremendously. Aesthetics, as a philosophical discipline, has
failed to keep abreast of the subject it is supposed to deal with, namely the
way art has expanded and developed. People are still writing commentaries on
Kant, Nietzsche or Heidegger. But the art world is so extraordinarily rich.
That’s just where you want to go forth, armed with your analytical tools, and
take it on, which is what I’ve tried to do.

HB: You write,
“The world of contemporary art is the price we pay for philosophical
illumination.”

AD: And I’m open for everything. Hegel put
things so beautifully so often and so powerfully, but he was deeply a
rationalist and saw a rational structure in the chaos of history. He felt the
world was through and through rational. I’m not as optimistic as that, but I do
think it’s a good way for philosophers to be — not to paint their faces and go dancing
around the camp fires, if you know what I mean.